The Followed Man

by Thomas Williams

  "That gave me a chill, I'll tell you, so I says, trying to head him off, 'Well, you'll never know for sure, now, will you?' Shem just looks at me for a while. 'Maybe not,' he says, but he takes a spent shotgun shell out of his pocket. 'You drop any spent shells near the truck?' he asks. 'Not that I know of,' I says, 'though I might.' 'Twelve gauge Peters, never been reloaded,' Shem says. In them days shotgun shells, 'cept for the brass at the base, was made of paper, so you could tell that easy enough. Shem looks at me. 'Don't tell nobody about this, Eph,' he says. 'You know and I know, and the lonesome son-of-a-bitch that shot Heidi, and that's enough.'

  "You'll be wondering what it was Wallace Ellis had against Shem Carr, that he shot his dog, and that's a story in itself."

  Eph's big hand, clasped all the way around the white coffee mug, was shiny and rugged, the hairless skin glazed with liver spots. Motionless except for the slight tremor of age, the hand it­self might have been ceramic, fired and cooled into its semitrans-lucent tan and rose. He'd taken off his visored cotton painter's cap when he came into the tent, and put it on his knee when he sat down; his bald dome was so much whiter than his face it looked like brown-grained marble above his faded gray eyes in their red lids. He still had his own yellow teeth, some of them, though they pushed out at awkward angles to his lips. Tillie Cole, twenty years younger than Eph, was at sixty neat, bony, softly immaculate of skin, and her eyes still seemed to recognize an irony and response that Eph in his age had outgrown.

  Eph paused to listen to the rain on the tent. "Still coming down pretty good," he said. "Might as well give up and come back Mon­day forenoon."

  "Eph," Tillie said. "Tell us what happened to Wallace Ellis."

  "Man was worthless anyway," Eph said. "And I never said noth­ing happened to him."

  "The Ford V-8," Tillie said.

  "That was some little truck," Eph said. "Eighty-five horsepower, go nearly ninety on the flats, which was where Shem and Wallace Ellis first got started. The old High Road to Leah, 'fore they wid­ened it and took the thank-you-ma'ams out of it, had this mile-long straightaway where all the young bucks used to see how fast their jalopies would go. Wallace Ellis was a sheriff's deputy, part time, had a Indian Chief motorcycle, and he fancied himself a motorcycle cop. That Indian was quite a machine, too—four cyl­inders set two-by-two upright in a block about as big as half a orange crate. Heavy machine, but once it got wound up it would go. Chain drive, air-cooled, had a little bitty windshield to keep the June bugs out of Wallace Ellis's eyes. Anyway, one time Shem was coming back from Leah and Wallace Ellis followed him on into Cascom, stopped him by the Grange Hall and accused him of speeding, told him next time he caught him going straight out like that he'd issue him a summons. I guess Shem responded with something you might call fairly inappropriate, and that was the beginning of the bad blood between the two of them.

  "I guess it was far enough from the war, and what with the state of the country and all, Shem having been a hero had ceased to cut much ice. Seemed like ancient history to most. Shem had long been used to having people treat him with a little more respect, though he never asked for no special treatment. I guess he'd just got used to it.

  "Well, knowing Shem you got to realize it was Wallace Ellis's manners offended him most, also the looks of the man. Wallace Ellis was bigger than Shem, for one thing, and he was one of your natural bullies. Most big men, and I speak from experience in the matter, don't have to go through life pushing people aside, humil­iating, proving something all the time. Lord knows, people was cautious enough about Wallace Ellis. Nobody went out of their way to get his attention. Don't know what it was about the man made him so ill-mannered. I won't go into details, but one thing led to another and Wallace Ellis pulled his gun and there was all manner of bad feelings and Shem had to go to court in Northlee, it was haying season and he lost a good drying day too, and pay a fine of seven dollars and fifty cents, which was a small fortune in them days. Shem was angry, as you might well expect, so he got the idea to challenge Wallace Ellis to put on the gloves with him. Put a note up in the Town Hall—that was the old frame building that burnt down in the '58 fires. The Legion Hall, which at that time was in the former Christian Science Church, had a boxing ring in the basement. At the time I says to Shem, 'Lord, Wallace Ellis weighs forty pounds more than you and he's ten years younger'n you. What do you expect to prove?' 'I ain't going to prove nothing,' Shem says. 'I'm going to take seven dollars and fifty cents out of his God damn hide.'

  "Now, the only boxing gloves they had at the Legion, they must have been left over from the Dempsey-Willard fight. They was so small and light you could have done your milking with them gloves on. You could have picked up a ten-cent piece off the ce­ment sidewalk in them gloves.

  "As you know, Shem was a fairly big man himself, around one-eighty, and spite of the weight difference there wa'n't much of a reach difference amongst the two of them. Shem had the advan­tage of having boxed some in the army, but the betting purely had to be on Wallace Ellis, and that's the way the betting went around Cascom and Leah. What I heard, there was more than a hundred dollars altogether, bet on that fight.

  "To make a long story short, the evening of the fight the Legion Hall basement was packed so full of men the ring ropes was hold­ing the crowd out, rather than the fighters in. And as for the fight itself, it started out terrible bad for Wallace Ellis and done nothing but get worse. When the bell rung for the first round Shem kind of tippy-toed out to Wallace Ellis—looked like a man about to tan­gle with a bear. I swear I almost shut my eyes and missed the first punch, which was Shem's left fist splitting Wallace Ellis's lip. Right off you could tell Wallace Ellis never had the first idea there was more to boxing than drawing your right arm back as far as it would go and letting fly, like trying to win a cigar at one of them Fourth of July carnival mallet dingers where you try to ring a bell. His arm wa'n't halfway back 'fore he got stung bad. His eyes opened up so's you could see the whites all around and the poor fellow knew he was in for it. Shem got nicked a few times, and but­ted, and one of them big arms now and then like somebody dropped a log on his shoulder, but it was Wallace Ellis took the licking.

  "After seven rounds young Doc Churchill near had a fit and made them stop the fight, took Wallace Ellis off to Northlee Hos­pital, he looked like a accident involving raspberry preserves and barn paint. Shem never knocked him down, said afterwards he never meant to knock him down. Said he could if he wanted, and I believe it. Wallace Ellis fell down once in the fifth round, slipped in his own blood it looked like, but Shem wa'n't about to let him off the hook. Said afterwards he only got about four dollars and twenty-five cents worth of satisfaction, so Wallace Ellis still owed him three and a quarter. That remark was widely quoted around Cascom and Leah and never did serve to make Wallace Ellis any happier.

  "A year or so later, toward the beginning of rabbit season, was when Shem found Heidi with half her head blowed off, found that Peters twelve gauge shell by the road, which happened to be the road Wallace Ellis took to work."

  Eph paused and shook his head. "I got to believe this rain has set in for a while." He took a sip of his coffee, which must have been cold by now, and Luke caught a quick, sly look across the rim of the cup. "Ayuh," Eph said with a sigh, "I figure we ought to give up for the day, Luke. Come back Monday forenoon and finish her up."

  "Now, Eph," Tillie said.

  "Well," Eph said, "I just figured Luke might want to hear that story about his Uncle Shem, is all."

  "Now you tell us what happened to Wallace Ellis," Tillie said.

  "Wallace Ellis? Wallace Ellis. Where was I? Wallace Ellis. So. We got to go back to that day in October, nineteen hundred and thirty-six, Shem and me was standing there next to his '34 Ford flathead V-8 pickup truck, next to my barn door. Shem put the burlap bags back over poor Heidi and I can see we're headed for trouble. 'Shem,' I says, 'I got an idea how upset you must be, but to my way of thinking what you got in mind ain't worth it. And be­sides, you
ain't that certain who done it.' 'I ain't going off half-cocked, Eph,' Shem says. 'I want you to get me a shell fired from Wallace Ellis's shotgun. I know it's a Winchester 97, hammer-pump, same as mine, cause I seen him at the Fish and Game pic­nic trying to hit clay pigeons.'

  "Well, that wa'n't hard to manage at all, as Shem was damn well aware, cause Wallace Ellis lost his cow that fall to TB, had to be de­stroyed, and I was delivering him one of my milkers since he had no truck at that time, just his Indian Chief motorcycle and a beat up '29 Chevrolet sedan the roof needed tarring in the worst way. He wa'n't a farmer, had somebody else do his haying, worked in Leah at the woolen mill as a bobbin racker. 'I don't know as I ought to get you a shell from Wallace Ellis's shotgun,' I says to Shem. But I did. It wa'n't hard—spent shells was laying all over his front stoop from him shooting at the pigeons lived in his barn across the way.

  "Well, it took me a week to deliver that cow and pick up that shell, though I could've done it that same day. I figured a dog is just a dog, not a blood relative, and if Shem had time to cool off some he wouldn't do nothing drastic. Besides, that was the same time they found out Shem and Carrie's son, Samuel, had the epi­leptic fits, so I figured he had other things on his mind. Figured he'd simmer down after a time.

  "Then toward the end of the month Wallace Ellis had the terri­ble accident on his Indian Chief motorcycle and killed himself— smashed his face off and broke his neck. He always did run that thing too fast.

  "Well, I always did wonder about that accident, but then after the first excitement I kind of never brought it up again. Then, just last fall, I come up here to the farm to take a few things to Shem. He looked so poor he'd likely never last the winter, and of course the house was falling in. I asked him for the umpteenth time to come live with me and Tillie, we got six extra rooms, but he wouldn't have none of that. So we sat in what was left of the kitchen reminiscing about old times—his head was still clear— things like his boxing match with Wallace Ellis, the good times we had hunting, and Shem come right out with it. 'It was Wallace El­lis shot Heidi,' he says. 'It was his spent shell I found beside Heidi that morning. There must have been a little kind of dimple on the head of the firing pin of his shotgun you never seen on mine nor any other I looked at, and I went clear to Concord looking at Win­chester 97 hammer-pumps, examining firing pins with some care. Ayuh, it was his gun that fired that shell, cause the mark on the primer was the same as on the shell you got me from Wallace El­lis's front stoop.'

  " 'Well,' I says, 'he soon got his reward.' 'Ayuh,' Shem says. Then something got into me, I don't know what, and I says right out, 'Shem, did you have anything to do with that motorcycle acci­dent?' He just looked at me. 'Hell,' he says, 'you had that suspicion in the back of your head all these years?' I guess I looked kind of funny, 'cause Shem says, 'Now, you know they give me a hunting license in the war, Eph, and I guess I got my limit on Huns, but just when the hell did they rescind that license? I don't remember nothing like that.' He's pulling my leg, of course. 'No,' he says. 'The unkindest thing to do with a poor son-of-a-bitch like Wallace Ellis is let him live.'

  "So you see, for forty years I kind of had the notion my best friend was a murderer. There ain't no limit to what a fellow can hold in his mind!" Eph laughed and slapped his hands down on the table to show that his story was over.

  "Why don't you tell the truth?" Tillie said.

  Eph didn't seem to hear her at first; his story was over. He didn't want to hear what she'd said. He was rigid, Luke could see now, not physically but with the carefulness of age, a brittleness that needed no surprises at all.

  "Maybe he don't want to hear the truth," Eph said, a quavery anger in his voice.

  "It was so long ago," Tillie said.

  "The truth then ain't necessary the truth now," Eph said. "And what in hell do you know about it, anyways?"

  "I slept in your bed forty years, listening to your babble asleep and awake. Tell about how when the REA first come in under the New Deal, there was wire left over here and there. Copper-coated steel. You used to sing that in your sleep sometimes: 'copper-coat­ed steel.'"

  "I don't see how you can 'strapolate nothing from some god­dam dream I had once. What are you after, anyway, Tillie Cole?"

  "I just thought you was going to tell the truth for once, after all the years."

  Eph wiped his hands over his pate, shaking his head. "You sure don't humor a man, to speak of, do you?"

  "Well, I never married you, Eph Buzzell, if that's what you mean."

  Eph's exasperation seemed out of place in such an old man, and Luke recognized in himself one of those wrong, romantic assump­tions of youth, that the old have long ago signed their contracts with life, all the paragraphs, subheadings and codicils in order for the calm, resigned autumnal retreat.

  "Women, women!" Eph said. "They ain't never satisfied. All right, maybe we made a mistake. Maybe Shem made a mistake. The idea was to give him a wing-ding he'd remember when he was pulling all that gravel out of his skin. I took a couple of turns around a pole, Shem around a maple tree. It was supposed to catch him just above his wheel, on the fork by the stem of his handlebars, below that little windshield, but one way or another it caught him just above his teeth, peeled his face off up to his hair and broke his neck. Him and his motorcycle went off in the woods, leaving his face laying there on the gravel. Shem found it with his flashlight, picked it up like you would a used hanky, you know, somebody else's snot in it, scuffed the gravel around to hide the blood, what little there was of it. We found Wallace Ellis amongst the saplings and Shem kind of stuck his face back on. Deader'n a mackerel, of course. Then we took our wire and went on home. There!" he said, looking closely at Tillie. "You satisfied now?"

  "You think I never guessed that part?" she said. "Tell us what Shem said to you last fall, then."

  Eph looked at Luke, thinking hard. "He said that about the li­cense they give him in the war."

  "I believe that part," Tillie said.

  "All right! He says when he heard that Indian Chief coming along so proud, he says to himself maybe the son-of-a-bitch has a way to feel gratified by what he done to Heidi. He says he remem­bered all in a flash how she run her heart out for him time and time again, and how she used to greet him when he come home. Then he says, 'Eph, I just took a higher turn around that white maple.'"

  Tillie said, "Eph, it don't matter that much to Luke, that he knows the truth about what his uncle Shem done so long ago. Luke was in a war himself."

  "Well, I never was in no war," Eph said. He was silent for a while, and Luke felt that in Eph's old brain, clogged here and there as it must be after eighty years, he was slowly and carefully rearranging the units of his story, his truths and devices.

  Finally Eph said, "Well, I says to Shem—this was last November, just before the first big snow—I says, 'Shem, that was forty years ago, when we was both full of piss and vinigar.' I'm looking at him, thinking he won't last the winter out, he looked so poor. He seemed to read my mind. He's setting there in his Morris chair. Lord, the old house was falling in, not a wall was straight, and wa­ter had leaked all over his stove, it was all rusty where the splattering grease couldn't reach. He looks at me and says, 'I know you're an atheist, Eph, but I don't know what I am. I got a feeling one of us is wrong and the other's confused, but I ain't certain. I don't know what's going to fall down first, this old house or the old bag of guts you're looking at, but it ain't going to be long, so maybe I'll get some answers. I killed a man for killing a dog, and if you can say it in so many words, and it don't turn your stomach, well, shit on it.'

  "That was the last time I seen Shem alive. Ayuh. Well, looks like this rain don't want to let up after all, Luke. We'll see you Monday forenoon, do the rest of the cleaning up around here. Won't take long, once we get to it."

  They left in the old Buick, Tillie driving.

  The cellar hole still smoked and hissed, live coals beneath. Drops of rain touched the gray ash with little plucking
sounds. Jake had come out of the tent with him, and when Luke just stood there looking down into the cellar hole, where rot and fire had taken down Shem's house, Jake curled up in the wet grass and the rain, and waited, his brown hound's eyes alert.

  16.

  At the Batemans' house that evening there had been a great shifting of books so that Phyllis's office could work as a living room. George had piled them around the walls, behind the sofa, to the ceiling of the small closet off the hall. "You don't know how dirty books are until you get your hands on 'em," George said.

  "Dirty books? Oh, my," Louise Sturgis said, which disgusted George, though he looked down at his feet to try to hide the ex­pression. He wore a necktie and a dark blue suit that was too nar­row and too long for him—his funeral and wedding suit, he told Luke when no one else was listening.

  Phyllis had introduced Luke to "Louise and Coleman Sturgis," and for a while Luke thought Coleman Sturgis must be Louise's husband, or ex-husband, but it turned out he was her brother. A young-looking, lanky man in his forties, he had the slightly rum­pled, translucent face of a drunk who seemed, for the evening, to be watching his intake. His eyes were blue, watery and ingratiat­ing, and he didn't resemble his darker sister at all.

  "Actually we've met," he said, "though you'd have no reason to remember me. It was at a party after a rather bizarre poetry reading at Moorham. I teach in the English Department and knew your wife. I'm terribly sorry about what happened. We were all absolutely devastated when we heard."

  Luke could think of nothing to say about Helen, so he made a rather desperate jump in memory, to a time when he'd gone with Helen to a poetry reading. "Was that the reading where the fellow took his clothes off?" he said.